Tag: Mineral Supply Chains

The United States (U.S.) policy in Africa has shifted under the ‘America First’ agenda from liberal peacebuilding and development aid towards strategic risk management. This model securitises critical mineral supply chains and biomedical surveillance while applying similar risk-control principles to trade, geopolitical competition and migration control, linking African policy choices to U.S. strategic interests. Using a qualitative comparative case study design and documentary analysis, the study compares the Washington Accords and the America First Global Health Strategy, assessing whether a common bargaining calculus spans peace, security and global health governance. The analysis identifies transactional realism as a distinct mode of governance within the America First agenda. This strategy privileges bilateral negotiation and frames foreign policy commitments as conditional, time-bound exchanges directly tied to measurable strategic returns. Importantly, this model does not formally abolish multilateral rules; rather, it bypasses them by shifting key decisions on conditionality, monitoring, and contract adjustment into executive-controlled bilateral arrangements. Analysing contractual provisions, including performance targets, review mechanisms and exit clauses, demonstrates how legal design can institutionalise power imbalances while still offering African states targeted resources. The article also examines migration externalisation as a scope probe to assess whether the pattern identified in the peace, security and health domains extends into migration governance. The analysis concludes that the defining transformation in U.S. strategy for Africa lies not in the turn towards bilateralism per se, but in the institutionalisation of conditionality through asymmetric agreements that structure how monitoring, adjustment and exit authority are distributed between the parties.